I’m at Founders Den Demo Night, where seven startups are making their pitches to investors, press and other members of the tech community. As with most other demo events, these aren’t launches per se (we’ve covered most of the companies already), but it’s a good opportunity for us to highlight these startups and the fact that they’re part of the Founders Den community.
Founders Den describes itself as a “clubhouse” for entrepreneurs. In addition to the offices and co-working desks that it offers startups in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, it does indeed have a clubhouse-style space. It’s also club-like in the fact that it’s invite-only and is usually looking for experienced entrepreneurs/more established startups — in fact, a number of the companies demonstrating today went through other incubators.
Here are the seven companies that are on-the-record (there are two that are still in stealth mode, so I’m not allowed to write about them yet). I’ll update with more details from their presentations.
Survata offers a “SurveyWall” for publishers, so that they can monetize their content without putting up a paywall, and in doing so it finds survey respondents for brands, agencies and universities. It was incubated by Y Combinator.
From the presentation: The company says that more than 1 million survey questions have already been answered.
Rollbar is an error-tracking product for developers. It was co-founded by Brian Rue, former CTO of Lolapps.
From the presentation: Rue said that there are already 200 companies actively using the product.
vidIQ offers analytics and other tools for video producers on YouTube to improve their distribution. It recently raised $800,000 in funding.
From the presentation: Customers already include a number of high-profile publishers, including TechCrunch-owner Aol and Revision3.
Clothia allows users to mix-and-match different outfits through its fashion website and iPad app. Users can also browse the outfits created by others in the community.
From the presentation: The iPad app doesn’t include many of the social features (they’re coming in April), but nearly 60 percent of users are already creating content, and 46 percent of them stay engaged from month to month.
Archy is a management and collaboration system for all your cloud storage services. It allows you to import your contacts and to share documents with them.
From the presentation: The current version is Google Drive only. It has 15,000 users, and 30 percent of them are sharing more fields through Archy than through the native Google app.
MOVL offers tools for creating content for multiple screens, particularly smart TVs. It launched its Kontrol.tv system last fall.
From the presentation: Movl showed off a number of products created on the platform including Swipe-it, which has been downloaded more than 300,000 times.
Namo Media aims to build better mobile advertising by focusing on “native” ads that appear in apps’ streams of content. It has raised $1.9 million from investors, including Google Ventures.
From the presentation: Co-founder Gabor Cselle was actually the only presenter tonight to take the stage for the second time — he presented an app called DrawChat at the last demo day, which he has since auctioned off.
Update: Managing partner Michael Levit also offered a “Founders Den report card,” where he said that in total, Founders Den companies have raised $140 million. However, he was only able to get data from 43 of the 85 total companies, so he estimated that the real number is probably “zeroing in on $200 million.” He added that “not all companies are created equal,” and in fact the top five companies (Dotcloud, Tout, Kaggle, Wanelo, and DataSift) account for more than half of the reported results. As for exits, he said that there have been five successful exits so far, including the $60 million acquisition of Socialcam by Autodesk, and three shtudowns.